Today's distributed processing business systems often include resources from multiple vendors and platforms connected through large open networks. To understand the status of a particular resource in a modern business system is to comprehend only a small part of the picture. To truly maximize the business value of business system investments, a business also must see how each resource affects the applications and business processes it supports.
Many resources in a distributed processing system are interdependent, and businesses must be able to demonstrate and leverage linkages between business systems and business processes. These links are critical to being agile, allowing business processes to drive technology decisions and priorities. Without these links, a business has virtually no way of knowing how an individual resource, or group of resources impact a given business process. If, for example, a particular Web server were to go down, a business would not be able to identify specific business processes that would be adversely affected.
Business systems management (BSM), also sometimes referred to as “business service management,” is an evolving technology that can be employed to help a business understand how the performance and availability of technology resources affect the applications, processes, and services that power a business. BSM technologies help a business prioritize technology resources that carry the highest business values, not just the latest problem that crops up. Revenue-generating activities, such as order processing—rather than internal processes, such as a human resources system—are prioritized in the event of a problem or outage.
BSM software products, such as TIVOLI Business Systems Manager from International Business Machines Corporation, enable a business to align daily operations management with business priorities, set and meet service level commitments, implement predictive management capabilities across business systems infrastructure, and generate reports to keep executives and business units that use the business's services informed and productive.
Problem management techniques, though, have not kept pace with the rest of BSM technology. Unlike the modern business systems just described, early business systems were based upon a relatively simple mainframe design that generally comprised a single mainframe computer connected to user terminals through a closed network. Problems in these early business systems could be detected simply by monitoring the network and the mainframe computer for undesired or unexpected performance. Likewise, any such problems could be resolved by repairing or adjusting one of these two components.
Clearly, such limited problem management techniques are inadequate for analyzing problems in a modern, complex business system in which the links between business systems and business processes are so critical. To effectively resolve problems in a modern business system, a business first must be able to identify the source of the problem—which itself may be a daunting task. The source of the problem could be a technology resource, a business process, a link between a resource and a process, or any combination thereof. Problem identification, though, is not the only new hurdle for modern business systems management. A single change to a single component of a business system can have widespread effects on many interdependent components. Sometimes, such changes can produce unexpected and undesired results. Thus, once a problem has been identified, a business also must be able to evaluate possible solutions to determine the effect of the solution on the business system as a whole.
Accordingly, there currently is a need for a problem management system that can identify a problem in a modem business system and evaluate the effect of a solution on the business system as a whole.